


Six Anchors Jedao Left Behind, and One He Didn't

by etothey



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Dyscalculia, Eventual Happy Ending, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28120866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/etothey
Summary: Sometimes Jedao learns from his anchors, instead of the other way around.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Six Anchors Jedao Left Behind, and One He Didn't

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sub_divided](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sub_divided/gifts).



## 1

The first time Jedao woke in someone else's body, he broke it.

It wasn't on purpose. Monster he might be forevermore, but he had no quarrel with his host. What was the word Kujen had used? His _anchor_ ; that which tied him to the world of the living.

Jedao didn't dream anymore, not in the black cradle, and not out of it, either. But memory held him fast, like a cage of unflinching light. He remembered the people he had killed. He remembered the ones who hadn't fought back.

"Pull the trigger, dammit," he shouted: a dead man shouting at a dead woman in a stranger's voice.

Gized had seen him level the gun at her. Jedao had fast reflexes, the more so when his life--when _everything_ \--was at stake. He'd already pulled his own trigger.

In those last moments, Gized reached toward her own sidearm, then let her hand flop uselessly back to her side. Smiled at him. _Smiled_ at him.

Gripped in the throes of memory, Jedao flung himself against the wall. He expected someone to come with restraints. Strong guards. They usually did, for violent prisoners.

No one came.

It didn't take long to adjust to the new body's parameters, how it moved best, how it moved worst. As for its vulnerable points, well, there were only so many variations in human anatomy. And Jedao was an expert in ways to kill. This included suicide in case of capture.

The man whose body Jedao inhabited didn't fight back, just as Gized hadn't fought back. Eventually the body stopped moving, went cold. Jedao coiled around it, a sick and helpless shadow.

He never learned the man's name.

## 2

Three bodies after that, Kujen started taking precautions. This time Jedao woke up in restraints. More than that, a drugged lassitude held him fast.

"I expected better of you," Kujen said. He was as beautiful as ever, as terrible as ever. Today, star sapphires and blood-colored pyrope circled his neck. "If you keep wrecking innocent Kel like that, I'm going to start installing you in laboratory rats. They're a hell of a lot more expendable."

"I didn't realize you ever thought the Kel _weren't_ expendable, Nirai-zho," Jedao retorted. He observed that his voice had a clipped, harsh accent, despite the drugged stupor; that it belonged to someone who, like himself, had learned the high language second or third, and not first.

"I gave you one that's halfway brain-dead," Kujen said. "I was done with him anyway."

The casual way Kujen mentioned that caused a cold finger of dread to worm its way down Jedao's borrowed spine. "Tell me what you want, Nirai-zho," Jedao said. "I won't try any tricks."

"Don't make promises you can't keep," Kujen said. "I'm releasing the restraints. I advise against trying to ambush me; you'll fall on your face."

Jedao blinked stupidly at his captor. " _Can_ you install me in a rat?" Not the immortality he had anticipated, but he imagined even a rat could be of use.

Kujen rolled his eyes. "You'd go crazy in a brain that small. Crazier, I should say." He smiled, sudden and sharp. "Tempted to try it, just to see."

"Don't waste your rats on me," Jedao said. "Why did you wake me up, Nirai-zho?"

"This is in the nature of a routine check," Kujen said. He made a complicated flowing gesture. Charts and diagrams flared into life between them, all glowing lines and graphs.

Jedao couldn't make heads or tails of them. He'd never seen any of this notation before. "I hope you don't expect that to mean anything to me," he remarked.

Kujen's smile was crooked and not a little cruel. "See that?" He pointed to one of the mysterious figures. "That's your aggression. You'd be useless to me without it, but perhaps I can direct some of it in more practical directions."

Before Jedao had a chance to ask what those directions might be, Kujen stabbed his shadow with a needle of light, and all his questions evaporated.

## 3

After Jedao woke in the seventh anchor, Kujen sat him down for some math tests.

The body belonged to a woman, not that Jedao cared about details like that. Admittedly being a woman felt _weird_ , not because he had hangups about it but because he had to adjust to the differences, the way that one really tall anchor had required a longer breaking-in period.

The woman, Nirai Larra, also had opinions, unlike the previous anchors. Opinions, and an unhealthy lack of fear. "I told you this was going to be a waste of time," she informed Kujen with the mouth she shared with Jedao. "You have no idea how painful it is to see my own hands writing down these answers."

"I'm doing my best," Jedao said doggedly. "Really, _math tests_?"

In his cadet days, he wouldn't have sat quietly for a completely unnecessary math test. He would have distracted the lecturer, or cheated off the class pet, or maybe even eaten the exam paper so it _couldn't_ be graded. He'd always known that there was no reasonable way he could pass the fucking stupid math requirements even for Shuos infantry, which weren't very, if he was _honest_. So he played dirty and barely squeaked through.

Jedao's tricks did not work on Kujen or, more to the point, Larra. Jedao had seriously considered picking a fight with one of the guards because _anything_ was better than sitting here trying to work out whether his attempted abuse of the Little Prime Theorem was failing because the damn number wasn't prime after all, or because he had transposed the digits of the divisor, or some other arithmetic failure. Unfortunately, Larra considered fights to be beneath her dignity, and she had the overriding veto on what her body did.

An interminable forty-seven minutes later, Kujen relented. "Do you think he was faking, Larra?" he asked.

Larra snorted. "I don't think it's _possible_ to fake being this wretched at math. Some of these answers aren't even wrong."

It was a good thing that any sense of math-related ego had been beaten out of Jedao back in primary school, when it first became evident that he confused subtraction and division, or 37 for 73, unlike everyone else in the class. "So glad to entertain," Jedao said in his most bored voice. "Now can I _please_ go back to hell?"

He wasn't bored in the slightest, of course, and Kujen undoubtedly realized it. Kujen was attempting to determine the limits of Jedao's ability to draw on his anchor's native intelligence and skills. Jedao had his own reasons for wanting to disguise the way that the answers glimmered in Larra's stupid Nirai brain, like fat trout in a river just waiting to be tickled up for dinner. Better if Kujen--and Larra--thought he had no _access_.

After all, even Kujen let details slip from time to time. The heptarchate was now a hexarchate, although Jedao wasn't sure when the transition--surely a bloody, messy one; these things always were--had happened. There was a civil war somewhere in the realm. All tantalizing, perhaps even deliberately mentioned in hopes of provoking a reaction.

Jedao knew, however, that he didn't dare move. Not with Larra, who held him in such contempt, and who spoke to Kujen with such easy familiarity. The contempt he could have dealt with, over time. The real problem was the fact that she was _comfortable_ with Kujen. Not exactly a stunning testament to her character.

Or to his, for that matter.

## 4

The excursion Jedao liked the most, ironically, involved one of the more depressing anchors. Kel Grigon got up early every morning, station time, to beg the forgiveness of the hexarchs and then to ritually cleanse themself via self-flagellation. Grigon even flagellated Jedao-the-shadow for good measure; Jedao didn't have the heart to tell them how hilarious this was. At least Grigon didn't preface every interaction with a quote from the Rahal scriptures, or conversation would have become very tedious very quickly. Jedao wondered what on earth Grigon had done to bring themself to Kujen's attention before figuring out that Kujen hoped that there was no way even Jedao could corrupt someone so blatantly scrupulous.

Still, Grigon's extreme orthodoxy had its uses. Jedao gave up on corruption early on--even he had his limits--and settled, instead, for a vacation.

"A shopping trip, sir?" Grigon said in an extremely martyred tone of voice. They were currently filling out forms. Grigon was almost as diligent about the paperwork that went with being an officer as they were about the hexarchate's state religion.

"It won't take you long to finish the day's paperwork," Jedao predicted. "And besides, it's only a handful of days--"

"Three days."

"Yes, that. Three days until New Year's. We need gifts for the gift exchange."

There was a slight hitch to Grigon's voice. "Sir, my family is _light-years away_ \--"

Jedao said, more gently, "I know. And mine is centuries dead. But I haven't seen a New Year's Festival since my execution." It was unfair to be so blunt with Grigon, but it worked so well. "It would be good for the spirit, would it not?"

Against this argument Grigon had no defense.

This was how Jedao discovered that Grigon fancied one of those kitschy, glitter-decorated calligraphy scrolls featuring one of the hexarchate's foundational verses: _each spoke of the wheel in its place, each faction its very own face_. No accounting for taste, but the point of the gift was to please the recipient.

He'd known from the start that Grigon was no stone on which to build a revolution. In a way that was a relief. He wouldn't have to break Grigon to his will. They could--almost--be friends, chance-met and chance-parted.

For his part, Jedao merely asked for a deck of jeng-zai cards, so Grigon could play solitaire for them.

Grigon had to buy both items for them, of course. Jedao was touched when Grigon asked to have the scroll and the deck wrapped, even if the two of them both knew what the gifts were.

## 5

One time Kujen installed him in an Andan poet, Shena. Jedao tried not to take out his frustration on her. Whether the poetry was any good or not, he couldn't tell. But the resemblance to his sister Nidana, even down to the fine bones of her face and the characteristic sarcastic wit, couldn't be a coincidence. Kujen never did anything by _accident_.

"You really don't like pantoums, do you?" she asked one evening while they were discussing propaganda possibilities.

It was one of his more unusual assignments. Kel Command generally wanted Jedao to smash people into little bits, not win them over. But he did have a certain reputation for being able to do the latter when he cared to.

Jedao sometimes wished he had a body of his own so he could shake his head, or meet someone's gaze, or any of the myriad gestures that coveyed a feeling. Instead, he only had words, words, words.

Words were Shena's weapon as much as they were his. He would do well not to forget that.

"I'm not sure I know the difference between a pantoum and a panzer," Jedao said lightly.

She laughed, as he had intended her to. "Nice try, General," Shena said. "You can find patterns, can't you? Poems are just another kind of pattern-recognition. Another game, if you will." 

It hadn't taken Shena long to capitalize upon Jedao's love of games. She and Jedao were currently in the process of examining every form of solitaire known to the hexarchate, including the heretical ones that assigned special values or abilities to the Seven of Doors, or the Deuce of Gears. Shena took _particular_ glee in stacking the deck so the latter card showed up on the final move. Sometimes he even caught her at it.

"The difference between an artillery barrage and a poem," Jedao said, in all sincerity, "is the former only threatens your life. The latter threatens your soul."

To that she had no answer.

## 6

Jedao had lost count of his anchors, which would have been a source of shame if shame meant anything to a notorious mass murderer. What was one life more or less in the terrible tally?

Anchor #??? was a sturdy young alt, to the extent that "young" meant anything to him anymore. All mortals looked young to him these days. Every time he saw the ticktock beating of the pulse in a neck, or the blink of an eye, he saw too the passing of time.

Only two people in the hexarchate had ever cheated death, and he was one of them, to his sorrow.

Said sturdy alt, who went by Kel Akharet because it was shorter than all _eight_ names in their birth-tongue, liked to talk. This suited Jedao fine. After the vast silences of the black cradle, he liked talking too.

Tonight they were preparing to attend a ball. A regrettable bit of politics that necessitated Jedao's attendance. Kel Command did so like to trot him out every now and again, to show the upper echelons that he'd dance on command. Sometimes literally.

Akharet paused in fastening up the buttons of their uniform. "I sometimes wonder what it's like for you," they said in a musing voice.

"Oh?" Jedao asked, neutral. He didn't want Akharet's pity, not because it hurt him, but because it had the potential to become a damned inconvenience. In the last century or so, Jedao had determined that it was easiest to do the things he had to do if he maintained a certain professional distance. At least, that was what he liked to tell himself.

"This uniform, for instance," Akharet said. "It differs in all sorts of ways from the ones extant when you were alive."

"Yes, I had noticed," Jedao said at his driest. He was remembering why he hated getting anchors who liked _history_. Especially history _minutiae_. As if he needed yet more reminders of the fact that time had passed him by.

Akharet, who knew just as well as he did that they had a full twenty-three minutes to make it to the Grand Hall, was intent on torturing him with the details. "In your day they had buttons instead of toggles. These fingerless gloves"--they held up their hands and smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle--"were worn by all seconded personnel, which I daresay most of my colleagues have forgotten, if they ever knew it at all. Tails in the jacket, which they gave up on two hundred years ago. On the other hand"--they plucked at the hanging golden chains of their epaulets--"none of _this_ embellishment, back then. Especially not in the field. And of course modern chameleonic fabrics have the ability to self-clean and absorb most foul substances, which vastly reduces the amount of laundering that needs to happen."

"Thank you for the fashion lesson," Jedao said. "It's all one to me. A shadow has no need of clothes."

A startled silence. Then: "I think you may even believe that by now," Akharet said. They did up the last button and smiled at Jedao-in-the-mirror. "Shall we?"

## 7

"I'm not _in_ you any longer," Jedao said wonderingly, the day after he woke up _himself_. He was in the _Harmony_ 's head, staring at his reflection in the mirror. Was that really him, angular jaw and dark eyes and all? He wasn't sure he remembered his features clearly.

Cheris was standing behind him, a jaundiced expression on her face. He could see her in the mirror, too. She said, "You realize I still remember every filthy joke you've ever made?"

"That came out wrong," Jedao admitted.

By mutual agreement, they were speaking aloud, not in each other's heads. Not now, when they didn't have an immediate need for a secure channel of communication. After centuries of forced closeness, Jedao found he treasured the illusion of solitude.

In his most terrible moments, he missed the black cradle. He would never say so to Cheris, but he knew she suspected it.

"You can stop admiring yourself any day now," Cheris added.

Jedao reached out and touched the mirror, then drew back, leaving fingerprints on the cool surface. "It's so strange," he said, "being on the other side of the mirror."

He backed out of the head, knowing that Cheris would give him space. "I can hear myself breathing," he said. "It's hard to get used to."

Her expression didn't soften, precisely, but there was an intimation of understanding in her eyes. "You have all the time in the world," she said.

"Only as much as you do," Jedao returned.

"Come on," she said, without answering the sentiment, although her disquiet thrummed down the silent connection between them. "Now that you have a body, you have to feed it from time to time." Her next words were at odds with her brisk tone. "I'm just sorry I can't offer you something tastier for the first actual meal you've had in four centuries."

"It's not the food," Jedao said, "it's the company." And he followed her to the _Harmony_ 's tiny, tidy galley, its waiting rations, its promise of companionship.

**Author's Note:**

> The "Little Prime Theorem" is Fermat's Little Theorem, modulo poor Jedao making hash of the whole thing.


End file.
